


touch

by SafelyCapricious



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Season/Series 01, Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-20
Updated: 2016-06-28
Packaged: 2018-05-27 19:40:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6297556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SafelyCapricious/pseuds/SafelyCapricious
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her hands itch in the nitrile gloves, but it’s a familiar feeling and easy enough to ignore. She prefers latex, but Agent Coulson has stocked the laboratory with only nitrile and it’s early enough in their team’s existence that she doesn’t want to make trouble.</p><p>Season one, canon divergence, Jemma centric.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. haphephobia

**Author's Note:**

> JD is being amazing and beta'ing the hell out of this for me, so give her all of the awards.

 Her hands itch in the nitrile gloves, but it’s a familiar feeling and easy enough to ignore. She prefers latex, but Agent Coulson has stocked the laboratory with only nitrile and it’s early enough in their team’s existence that she doesn’t want to make trouble.

She doesn’t remember the other problem with nitrile until they rip while she’s examining Skye – she pulls back with a sharp cry, barely feeling the impact of her hip against the table as her brain hiccups, visions of a woman cut into pieces, a man roaring until his voice gives out, standing with her hand in the tight grip of the woman next to her as a car drives away and all she feels is cold, cold, cold.

Fitz waves Skye away immediately, well used to Jemma’s eccentricities. And while she works on getting her breathing back under control she can hear him say, “no, don’t touch her, she’s fine – she’s got haphephobia.”

She’s got her breath back and she’s stripping off the torn glove, scrubbing at the hand with a kimwipe before she tries to pull on another. Her fingernails glint sparkly grey in the bright light of the laboratory.

“Happa-what?” Skye sounds concerned, which is touching considering their very short acquaintance.

“Haphephobia,” Fitz says carefully, “or, at least, that’s what she says. I think it’s more likely more of a mysophobia since she’s totally fine with touching as long as she’s wearing gloves, but she insists that –“

“Dude, I have no idea what you’re talking about. What-a-phobia?”

Jemma finally manages to pull her glove back on and she forces herself to relax, even while she double gloves and tries to smile. “Haphephobia – the fear of touching. Specifically with my hands. I do not have mysophobia – which is the fear of germs – I quite _like_ dealing with germs if you will recall what my fields are in, _Fitz_.”

Fitz grumbles to himself, the same complaint as always, and she ignores it as always and reaches forward to touch Skye’s shoulder.

“I am sorry for startling you, I just…don’t like skin contact.” She knows that her smile looks forced, but given her ‘phobia,’ this seems reasonable – it has for years. Or, at least, despite her inability to lie no one has ever called her on this one. Including the numerous psychologists and psychiatrists that SHIELD had her speak to, before trying to get her medicated. She’d refused and offered to drop from the program if they weren’t comfortable with her condition. They had not called her bluff and had simply made copious notes in her file. Before Agent Coulson’s insistence on her joining the team it had been enough to permanently keep her from fieldwork.

She’s not sure, honestly, how she feels about it. On one hand, she never particularly wanted to get shot at – which she has now – but she also never wanted to be stuck inside and working on the same things, day in and day out.

Ideally, she thinks, she’d like to be at a base somewhere where she can, sometimes, go into the field to gather samples but mostly be able to do her work quietly. Without other people around who she might –

But none of that matters now, because this is where she is and she’s going to put on a good face for it. And who knows, maybe it will all turn out much better than expected?

And if it doesn’t then getting herself removed from the team shouldn’t be terribly difficult, even if it does see her forced back into a lab without windows in a secured building.

She knows there’s an easier answer, but that is…not somewhere she’s willing to go back to. Not if she has any other choice.

Skye, of course, tries to smile – Jemma is starting to realize that Skye, despite her obvious trauma (and she’s not even going to think about what she saw in that brief instant of skin contact) is the sort of woman who always tries to see the brightness in the world.

It’s a good attitude to have and will serve her well in SHIELD, Jemma is sure. It’s very similar to how Jemma gets through her days, after all – not that all of them need it, of course. Some are fine and don’t force her to think of things she’d rather not, but days when she does touch someone…

She’ll bring up the nitrile versus latex issue with Agent Coulson within the next few days, she decides. And she’ll just double glove until then to be on the safe side.

 

***

 

Jemma gets her latex gloves and she thinks – hopes – that will be the end of it, that she’ll be able to avoid touching anyone else with her hands. And for a while she’s right. 

Fitz continues to leave books of techniques for dealing with phobias lying around – something he’s been doing since they first stopped competing and became friends back at the academy – and she continues to ignore them.

Skye starts sending her links to sites that are filled with fashionable gloves, but she never says anything about it, so Jemma ignores those along with the books and carries on.

Neither May nor Ward change their behavior at all, and Jemma’s not sure if that means that they didn’t hear about the incident or if they are just comfortable attributing any abnormal behavior to the oddness of SciTech agents in general.

Which is a relief, really.

Over the next few weeks she manages to not rip a single pair of her gloves, even after having examined several members of the team numerous times. She does accidentally brush against Fitz once, early in the morning when she’s reaching for a petri dish and hasn’t realized he’s come into the room. But she’s touched Fitz before, and though it’s always a jolt to fall into, it never sets her back very long.

It’s one of the reasons, from her point of view at least, that they can be such close friends. She knows he doesn’t know it and that his feelings might be bruised if he did, but it’s still comfortable to be around him and she feels as if she can relax more than she can around most anyone else.

She’s never seriously considered telling him, however, until she’s infected and so close to death that she imagines she can taste it, then she almost tells him – because he’s helping her and even though she’s dealing with the biological side of it, it still might be information he needs to help. But what good would it do, really? The mice are already a stretch even if her DNA was completely human and since it’s not there’s no telling what –

She peels off her gloves and smiles at him, he doesn’t see because he’s babbling about what they can try next and – she hesitates at the last moment and hits him over the head instead. She can’t check his pulse without touching him and though he’s likely infected she’s still hoping he’s not so she spares him one last glance, wipes at her tears and heads for the ramp.

Her mother is never going to forgive her for this and she wishes she could tell her somehow how sorry she is. She almost turns back to see if she can find something to write a note but then she sees that Fitz is awake and – oh no.

She jumps.

Her eyes sting from the wind and everything is turning and she doesn’t want to close her eyes because this is the last time she’ll ever see anything but – she blinks away tears and there’s a dark shape falling after her and –

No.

 _No_.

She squeezes her eyes tight and tries to fall faster but Ward catches her and she can feel his voice rumbling against her chest but with the rush of wind she can’t hear what he’s saying and he clearly doesn’t realize she’s trying to push him away and wraps himself fully around her and her hands are trapped against his chest and her right touches his skin through the neck of his shirt and –

It’s horrible.

Oh, oh god.

She pushes his little brother into a well with his older brother looming, she experiences years of abuse compacted into scattered, concentrated moments, she kills his dog and murders children under orders and –

It’s a relief when there’s sharp pain in her thigh and her world goes dark and then there’s cold, cold, cold, and she’s in the water and she wretches herself away from him, though his arm around her keeps her there but at least her hands aren’t touching him.

She opens her mouth to say – she’s not sure what, ‘I’m sorry’, ‘who are you’, ‘how’, ‘what have you done’ – but nothing comes out.

She can feel his feet treading water and keeping them afloat and he uses his hand to brush her hair back behind her ear from where it’s fallen in a wet mess over one eye. “You okay, Simmons?”

She hits him, just her balled up fist against his chest but his shirt is wet and it’s her right hand and she must have lost her goddamn mind because she starts to see _more_.

How can he have more?

She tries to breathe through the pain of it all and finds herself gasping with it and even though his grip is secure she bobs dangerously in the water. His frown deepens and then he’s reaching for her chin and she can’t help but try to get away, even though his touch will do nothing, but he’s still holding her with an arm around her waist and he is the only thing keeping her afloat.

The sound of the motor of a boat is a welcome relief, and she doesn’t even hesitate to reach for the hand that’s offered to her because there is no way this random agent’s past trauma can even vaguely compete with what she’s just seen – with what she’s trying to come to terms with.

It doesn’t (he was bullied as a child and had a terrible haircut for a few years).

She doesn’t speak – she can’t speak, and she can see the others on the boat giving her a wide berth and though Ward hovers he’s clearly marking it up to her own trauma and not forcing words on her.

She chokes on a sob and then he’s there with his arms wrapped around her but her hands are tucked into the sleeves of the jllaba that one of the men had wrapped around her.

He’s warm and it would be so easy to accept his comfort but he’s the one who should be comforted and her mouth is just a mess of questions about the nameless people and the moments she’s seen and –

She melts into his embrace anyways when he runs a firm hand down her back and bites her lip to keep the words in.

“You’re safe, Simmons. I’ve got you.”

Jemma sobs or laughs, she’s not sure which, and he just holds her closer and keeps talking. She lets his voice become white noise as she tries to find herself in her own mind.

Ward’s trauma is extensive. It’s extensive and intense and she almost feels as bad as she did when her mother gathered her close once the last of the stone had fallen away, sobbing because she was sure she’d lost her other child as well – and to an _accident_ – and Jemma’d gotten to watch in detail her brother chip away until he was nothing but rubble and dust.

Over and over, because her mother thought her screaming was a sign that she _needed_ to be held. Not that she wanted free.

With hindsight, Jemma can see why she would feel that way, especially after having seen her only other child _not_ come back from the chrysalis stage only a scant few weeks before. But she still has nightmares of being stuck in an endless loop of reliving the death of her brother – a death she wasn’t even present for.

She hadn’t thought, up until this moment, that anything anyone else can show her would ever be close to as bad. She was wrong.

Jemma doesn’t actually fully understand her powers – or, at least, her right hand – it is the only part of her life where her own curiosity and push for answers pauses. What she does have are theories that she doesn’t want to ever test. She sees past trauma when she touches someone. Trauma, she thinks, that shapes a person because otherwise there would be more. There would have to be. A thousand little moments of small traumas. She only sees the big moments – the defining moments. Or, at least, that’s what it seems like to her.

Which means, theoretically, that Ward has so much _more_ that she hasn’t even seen and – 

This time she knows she’s crying and she’s crying for him.

She makes sure her hands are securely wrapped in the sleeves and clenches the cloth between her fingers just to be sure, and then she lets him pull her so far into his embrace that she can’t see what’s happening and can barely hear anything over the steady beat of his heart and her own harsh, wet breaths.

There’s some commotion after a time, and she assumes that it’s simply the boat coming to a stop but then there’s another set of hands on her shoulders and Ward is _snarling_ and then his hand has moved from her back to her head and to her legs and he’s holding her snug against him and picking her up. She can barely control her own breathing enough to hear that he’s speaking in another language, presumably Arabic though it could also be a regional dialect for all she knows.

Jemma feels weak and shaky and she’s willing to admit that some of it _might_ be from her fall – and the disease and the stress – and not just from experiencing his trauma. So even when his hand lifts off of her head she doesn’t try to move to see what’s happening, in fact, she closes her eyes and lets the smoothness of his gait lull her into sleep.

 

***

 

She wakes up on a firm surface, and at first she thinks she’s on a bench and alone but then she realizes that it’s not a pillow under her head it’s a thigh and – _oh_.

She flexes her naked hand where it’s resting against the dark blue of his jeans and realizes with a start that she’s not wrapped in the same jlaba as earlier. She sits up quickly and turns, nearly unbalancing on the narrow ponj. Ward has his left hand raised from where it had been resting against her head and a book in the other and she realizes that his clothes aren’t what he was wearing when he jumped either.

“What…” she barely manages and he’s putting his book down and lacing his fingers together.

“We were soaked. They had us in quarantine but then decided we were fine – some of the women dressed you.” Suddenly he looks sheepish and it makes him look younger and – she crushes back her thoughts and tries to focus on his words. “They don’t have any gloves here, or, none I could get on you, so I had you in mittens but they were wool and…”

He trails off and she glances down, only now realizing that the skin of her wrists and the back of her hands is slightly red and feels itchy. She’s never reacted well too wool. “Oh.”

Ward grimaces and rubs the back of his neck. “The Bus can’t land here – there’s not enough space since this is a small base and located in the middle of the city – so they went to the Sand Box to refuel and are sending a jump jet to us.”

She finds her eyes tracing his face, looking for any sign that would show her some verification of his past – she knows it’s true but – how? “Do we know when that’s likely to be, or…?”

He shrugs lightly and fidgets with the edge of his book. “Another two hours or so, is the E.T.A.” He hesitates than meets her eyes squarely and asks, “Do you need to talk about it?”

She almost laughs. Her own trauma in the face of his is…so small. She might, actually, have more of a fear of wells now than of heights and – there’s no way she can possibly explain that. She imagines taking him up on the offer that is so clearly making him uncomfortable, but she’d probably just want to talk about him. So instead she shrugs and shakes her head and then, at a loss for anything else to do, just lies down again facing away from him with her cheek against his thigh. He’s tense, but after a moment his fingers start to run through her hair again and she thinks, some more, about what he’s been through and finds her eyes tearing up. 

She falls back asleep at some point. It feels like she just closes her eyes but when she opens them Skye is suddenly inches from her face and she jerks back into Ward with a small cry of alarm.

She presses a still bare hand over her heart and tries to will it to calm down. Ward has a hand curled around her hip keeping her steady since she’s half balanced on him and half on the ponj due to her move backwards. Skye just grins brightly, though Jemma can see the edge of worry at the corners of her mouth, and holds out –

“Oh, Skye!” Jemma doesn’t have words for how she’s feeling so she simply gratefully snatches the lovely pair of leather gloves from Skye’s hands and pulls them on before pulling the other woman into a tight hug.

 

***

 

It’s hard not to look at Ward differently, after that. Jemma’s painfully aware that he’s noticed – she’s not subtle and he’s been trained to notice tiny deviations in behavior – but he doesn’t say anything.

Skye, she knows, thinks she has a crush. (She knows because if Jemma herself isn’t subtle then Skye is the antithesis of subtle.)

 That isn’t what this is though. Not that Jemma doesn’t find Ward very physically attractive, of course she does, she did before she saw his past and nothing has changed – though it’s not the very symmetrical features or the cheekbones that look like they could actually cause you damage that she’s always found most appealing, it’s the look he gets in his eyes sometimes when he’s trying to remain proper, or when he gets protective and…The point is that this isn’t a crush. She still finds him appealing, but this is _protective_ on her part.

She can’t undo his past and she can’t possibly bring it up in anyway that won’t cause more problems, but she still wants to try to protect him from it. Which is, well, silly. What is she going to do, tell Coulson that Ward isn’t allowed on any missions that involve black labs or wells?

So she watches him a little more closely after, because she doesn’t know what else she can do.

It doesn’t occur to her until he’s trying to coax her up the tree, she’s never been a huge fan of heights and while she doesn’t think she’s actually developed a phobia she is slightly more wary since her fall, that this is what she can do. She can let him protect them and help them.

She feels better for having her plan for only a few hours before it all goes terribly wrong.

 

***

 

“Well I don’t see why –“ Fitz and Skye are arguing and she’s the only one who can see Ward’s knuckles getting whiter and whiter where he grips the arms of the chair, so she steps in.

“Get out,” she says at a normal volume, but then when Fitz and Skye only turn to look at her and don’t move she raises her voice and shoo’s them towards the door, “Out! Out, out, out!”

Fitz manages a baffled “what?” and Skye gets “Simmons?” out before she’s forcefully shoved them out the door and locked it behind them. Since they’re in the lab they’re clearly visible through the walls, but at least they aren’t _here_.

She gives herself a moment, leaning against the door with her eyes closed to decide on her plan of attack. Then she turns back to Ward and carefully checks her gloves before moving to his side. She rests her fingers against his wrist and catches his eyes. He’s still got a white knuckled grip on the arms of his chair and she wishes she could help more.

“There, a little quiet.” She’s hovering and so she drags a stool forward that puts her slightly lower than him and settles down into it. “Now, I don’t know exactly what you’re going through,” but she has a much better idea than he’s likely to assume, “but it must be terrible. And I know you want to protect us, but will you let me fit you with a heart monitor so that I can know that you’re not hurting yourself in protecting us?”

“I’m fine,” he says and it’s fascinating to watch the muscle in his jaw jump as he holds himself so tightly.

“Yes,” she says, fingers gentle over his pulse, “you are. And I want to make sure you stay that way. Please, Ward? It’s small.” She manages to grab the small patch that she left on the table behind her with her free hand and hold it up.

He turns his head and fixes her with a stare that raises goosebumps along her skin. His gaze moves from her face to the small circle in her hand and after a long moment he gives a single sharp nod. She lets out a breath of relief and reaches to pull his shirt up so she can place it on the skin over his heart before he can change his mind.

She has more, to monitor his breathing and chemical signals but – as she carefully peels off the ones that she put on for the initial test that almost ended in disaster – she knows not to push her luck. The fact that he’s not fighting her, even though she can see his heart rate is elevated on her tablet, is more than she was expecting. And she’d rather have this than nothing.

Once she’s removed the last of the other sensors and he still hasn’t moved she hesitates in front of him. His gaze hasn’t left her since she put the heart monitor on his skin and where she normally feels she’s gotten good at reading his expression she has no idea what this one means.

Finally he says, “Thanks, Simmons.”

She smiles brightly at him and steps back when he stands. She wants to make sure he knows she’s here for him but she doesn’t want to overstep, so she ends up saying, “I’m here to catch you if you fall, too. Okay?”

He pauses on his way out the door, tilts his head at her and then a ghost of a smile passes over his face before he’s throwing the lock and heading towards the punching bag.

She spends the next half hour cleaning up the lab while watching him through the glass doors. When she manages to drag her eyes away from his form they head directly for her tablet and the steady, if elevated, heart rate it’s showing.

 

***

 

Ward comes to her, when it’s all over. She’s been watching his heart rate, as irregular as it continues to be, it’s the only thing that’s bringing her any comfort.

Her gloves didn’t rip, but apparently actual skin contact isn’t necessary for Asgardians.

She’s washed her hands a dozen times and she still feels like they’re covered in viscera. It doesn’t matter that Randolph hasn’t killed in centuries, she got to see them all. (He got to experience them all as well, which is no comfort since it seems to have only made him more fascinated with her.)

She knows she looks pale and sickly – she’s been staring at herself in the mirror over her sink while she scrubs at the skin of her palms – but it’s nothing compared to how Ward looks when she opens the door.

His eyes are red rimmed and he’s got wounds that she knows he didn’t have when she left him earlier and her hands are flying up to touch them without conscious thought – she realizes they’re still bare mere moments before they touch his skin and she wrenches herself back with a cry.

 He catches her, easily, one hand looping around her waist and she hears the clink of glass behind her but she’s too busy staring at her own hands in horror to see what he’s holding.

He tucks some of her hair behind her ear with his other hand and carefully straightens her, not touching her hands once. “Sorry,” he says, finally and completely insincerely, and only then does he drop the hand from around her waist.

“No, it’s not – “ she stutters on her words and her skin is still too damp from washing to pull on latex gloves so with a huff of frustration she goes digging in her bag for the pair of leather gloves that Skye had so recently given her. “I’m not –“ She shakes her head and tries to focus on what’s important. “You!”

He doesn’t startle despite her raised voice, and simply arches an eyebrow while he shuts her hotel door behind him and places the bottle of alcohol and cups he was carrying in his other hand on the table. “Me?”

She reaches forward for his face and carefully tilts it into the light so she can better see the damage. “What did you do? What happened? Are you okay?”

He smiles, tightly, and grabs her hand and pulls it away from his chin where she’d been gripping. “I’m fine. Me and May worked through some of our aggression.”

Her eyes dart to where she still has his heart rate pulled up and she can’t help but scoff. His gaze follows hers and his grip on her hand tightens when he realizes what he’s looking at.

He drops her hand and walks over to it curiously, before picking it up and holding it out to her. “Did you equip May with one of these, to watch the after effects?”

He knows she didn’t and she doesn’t know what he’s trying to prove. She’s too off balance from millennia of death to be able to deal with it, so she crosses her arms and refuses to take it from him, setting her chin and trying to stare him down.

He shrugs and sets it back where it was before stepping close enough that she can see his pulse, still elevated, clearly through his skin.

“I do feel better,” he offers, fingers curling around her elbows, “even if I’m not.”

She can almost see the shattered vase that his mother threw at him in his eyes and she feels some of her tension leak away. If anyone is capable of handling a resurgence of their past, she supposes, it would be him. She drops her arms to hang loosely at her sides, but instead of letting go of her elbows he simply shifts closer and is suddenly holding her hands and the smile that she was trying to give him never fully forms.

“I thought though, you might want to help me work through the rest of it?” He seems impossibly close and she can only swallow carefully and nod.

 

***

 

Her headache follows her for the entire next day. The only comfort is that Ward is suffering just as much from his hangover. (The fact that he lets her do a full physical, once they’ve both gotten themselves back to the Bus, is also a comfort – especially because while some of his results are still irregular, they’re much closer to baseline.)

And, sometime in the midst of passing the bottle back and forth and whispering secrets, she’d managed to dull the images that Randolph had left her with. Which is somehow less important to her than how she woke up with her cheek against Ward’s chest and his fingers tangled in her hair, but still it’s nice.

Fitz spends the day in a bad mood that Jemma would care about more if her head wasn’t pounding and if his banging around without actually doing anything in the lab wasn’t making it worse. She’s about to snap at him when she realizes she’s not doing anything productive either and instead ends up taking a mid-morning nap in the common room.

She wakes up with a blanket draped over her and Ward in the other chair reading. She makes them both tea before trying to return to her work. May lets her take samples, though her reactions to the staff seem minor compared to Ward’s. Jemma isn’t willing to hazard a guess as to what that means, so she simply makes note of it and moves on.

As they fly away with the staff to make sure it gets locked away she hopes that this is the last time she’ll have to come into contact with an Asgardian.


	2. aphenphosmphobia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A compound that can heal that kind of damage is – the number of lives she could save – that _anyone_ could save.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was assisted along dramatically by JD, who continues to be amazing.

 There is something Coulson isn’t saying about the compound she used to save Skye and if she thought there was a chance to know exactly what it was from Coulson’s trauma then she would absolutely touch him. But she doesn’t want to put herself through that if the only information she’s going to get is that coming back to life is painful.

A compound that can heal that kind of damage is – the number of lives she could save – that _anyone_ could save.

(A small part of her wonders just what else it could heal, if it could even make her human again – and though she _knows_ that’s not possible, that she’s not sick or injured, that she’s fundamentally _changed,_ a small part of her still hopes.)

But Coulson won’t tell her anything about it and all of her attempts to isolate it from Skye’s blood prove fruitless. 

She feels like crying, and it doesn’t matter that she knows she would rather have Skye alive and well than answers, it still feels like a loss. 

Ward finds her the night after Agent Garrett and Triplett have left – and she’s not sure how she feels about knowing that Agent Garrett was the one there when Ward was forced to kill his dog – sitting in the common area and staring at her gloved hands and trying not to cry.

 She’d put Skye to bed, the other woman was just now starting to fight her bed rest but Jemma wasn’t willing to let her risk herself, not until she had more answers, and she hadn’t been able to make it to her own room before the heavy weight of reality dragged her down. Which was how she found herself sitting on the edge of the table in the common area fighting tears.

He sits down on the couch in front of her and laces his fingers through hers and she can feel the pressure at the back of her throat building and she knows that if she moves she’s going to break into a thousand pieces so she holds very still.

“Simmons,” he says, voice soft enough that it seems to blend into the hum that the Bus has even when it’s stationary. When she doesn’t respond or move he doesn’t get louder, he just leans closer and says, “Jemma.”

She breaks.

She collapses forward and rests her forehead onto his hands; hands that she’s now clutching tightly between hers as she cries silently. She cries for herself and for him and for having almost lost Skye and for the terror when she saw the grenade and for his dog and for whatever’s going to come.

He untangles his fingers from hers so that he can cup her face and wipe her tears away and guide her off the table and onto the couch. She sinks into his side and continues to cry, as silently as she can, and she’s reminded painfully of the last time, of being pulled from the ocean and finding herself in this position and how unfair she thought it all was then. She was so naïve.

This time she’s not so worn down that she falls asleep. Instead she finds herself fighting the hiccups once the tears are gone, and Ward gently disengages from her and brings her back a cup of water that helps.

“Sorry,” she says, once her diaphragm has stopped seizing, wiping at her eyes with the collar of her shirt – latex doesn’t wipe tears away well.

“Don’t be,” he says and takes her face between his palms to wipe at her eyes with his thumbs instead.

She doesn’t know how he stays so strong, in the face of everything with his past and she wants to ask but she doesn’t know how, so instead she just reaches up and grips his hand in her own and says, “Thank you.”

He smiles that little half smile that’s more in his eyes than on his lips. “I’ll always catch you, okay?”

She lets out a shuddering breath and nods before giving his hand one last squeeze and standing up. His hands are there to steady her as he stands with her, but she crosses the distance from the couch to her bunk on her own, throwing him one last small smile before closing the door and preparing for bed.

 

***

 

Jemma carefully pulls on another pair of latex gloves and lets out a breath. Skye is regarding her curiously from her bed, but Jemma knows that’s just a cover so that she won’t suspect the next time she tries to make a run for it – like she did just this morning. Sif’s appearance almost had Jemma distracted enough to let it happen too, and Jemma is sure Skye is expecting another opportunity sooner rather than later. Probably when the team comes back with the other one – whatever her name is.

Jemma is determined not to give her the chance, even if she has to stay in this room all day to make sure Skye remains in bed.

She half expects another awkward conversation about something, maybe Skye will ask about sex with the gloves again, because explaining how she had to convince a one-night-stand she had a doctor kink and wanted to have sex in gloves and a lab coat hadn’t been awkward enough the first time.

The question doesn’t come though, Skye just pouts, and Jemma is half disappointed by it. It’s just another sign that Skye hasn’t quite bounced back from being shot yet.

(Jemma thinks, in the dark part of her mind that she reserves for the man who talked her brother into what led to his death, that she’d love to find Ian Quinn and wrap her ungloved hands around his throat.)

“I like that nail polish,” is what Skye finally says, and Jemma blinks from where she’s fussing with the cuff of her gloves and looks at the other girl’s sheepish expression.

Jemma’s nails aren’t painted, but she does keep polish of a similar color in her room, so she claps her hands together and grins brightly. “Well then, I know how we’re spending the rest of the time before the team gets back.”

Skye is smiling and laughing and complaining less about bed rest, all of her nails a sparkling grey, when the team trudges back in.

Ward isn’t with them, and Jemma can feel her heart in her throat. If something’s happened to him like what happened to Skye and –

She can’t even finish the thought.

She didn’t even say a proper goodbye to him before the mission since she thought she’d found something in Skye’s blood and had been avoiding Sif and –

What if they don’t get him back?

Skye’s nails are smudging as she grips the bedspread when Coulson tells them what happened and sets Skye to work tracking Ward.

Jemma bites back the urge to ask them what they thought would happen, sending in a team of men against an opponent who is specifically able to turn men to her side – they should’ve just sent May and Sif in and been done with it.

She becomes, perhaps, a bit more overprotective of Skye in the meantime. While she further ruins her nails typing, the others work out a plan to get Ward back and take down Lorelei. But, well, when she’s not focusing on keeping Skye in bed where she belongs, her mind is drifting to Ward and –

She rips seven pairs of gloves over the course of the evening before she finally gives in to exhaustion.

 

***

 

Jemma doesn’t know the full details of the plan the team came up with, she’s not involved in that, and once she’s made breakfast she brings it down to share with Skye – as well as to share her worry and attempt to keep her distracted while Sif, Coulson and May lead the team after their wayward teammate.

She again bites her tongue on pointing out that maybe _Coulson_ isn’t the best to be on said team.

She’s glad that Sif is leaving with them, not just because she can still remember Randolph and – she’s been very careful to always be so busy that she can’t offer Sif more than a nod of acknowledgement when they’re in the same room together – but also because she seems very capable and if anyone is likely to bring Ward back to them it seems like it would be her.

Fitz is busy trying to fix the necklace so she and Skye spend their time trying not to worry too much. Skye keeps shooting her looks and almost asking questions, but they just end up fixing her nails and then doing both of their toenails in bright blue while they wait instead.

There’s a pit of dread growing in Jemma’s gut and she’s not surprised when Fitz shows up, looking anxious. She’s in the lab, keeping an eye on Skye – who she didn’t trust to leave on her own in bed and who is making a great show of not moving from her seat while Jemma fiddles around – running a test she’s run a million times before but that she’s fruitlessly hoping will give actual results this time, when he shows up.

“Jemma!” he says, voice high pitched and bright and so very clearly _wrong_ that she doesn’t even need to see Skye’s immediate alarm to know that something has gone terribly. 

“Leo,” she tries, carefully turning and fiddling with the cuff of her glove as he smiles broadly at her, small beads of sweat on the edge of his hairline.

“Why don’t we all play some cards?” he says, but instead of producing the cards he just stands there, waiting.

“Yes,” Jemma says, ignoring Skye’s slightly panicked hiss of “Simmons!” behind her, “that sounds lovely. Give me just a moment, won’t you?”

When she brushes by him though, intending to go for the ICER she’s been fiddling with the dosing on, he reaches out and grabs her wrist in a tight grip. Her glove has slipped a little but instead of seeing his trauma all she sees is a pretty female face. It’s like he’s empty and all that’s there is _Lorelei._

She moves then, without giving herself time to fully consider all of the consequences but knowing she has to do something, strips the glove off her left hand in a smooth motion and places it over his.

Now she sees all of his trauma – and so does he. He tries to let go of her wrist but her left hand is wrapped too securely around his to allow the break in contact at all. His eyes widen and then glaze over and then he’s slumping forward, tears leaking down his face, and she’s catching him and carefully lowering him to the floor. The long term damage, she tries to remind herself as she makes sure he hasn’t hit his head, is less than if she’d tried to physically knock him out. It still doesn’t make her hate having done it – or her left hand – any less.

“Skye! There are zip ties in my desk – it was for a, nevermind – get them and bring them.”

Skye doesn’t hesitate, not even bothering with some smartass question about being able to get out of the chair, and in short order they have Fitz secured. Jemma carefully keeps her left hand away from Skye until she has time to pull another glove on. And then, because the memory is too fresh, she pulls on a second for security. Skye doesn’t comment.

 

***

 

Skye doesn’t ask about how Jemma took care of Fitz, and she knows it’s coming, can see it in every glance Skye gives her, but she’s glad they’re both willing to prioritize rescuing their teammates over that conversation. At least for now. And maybe, if she’s lucky, by the time they have that conversation she’ll actually have a convincing lie to give.

But for now she can’t focus on lies, convincing or otherwise, not when they need to focus on how to help. The Bus is in the air now, which is…not great for any of their original plans. Especially not when they are, as far as they know, on their own. Skye has taken over the communications so they can at least see where everyone is on the Bus, and neither Sif, Coulson nor May are in sight.

Which, on one hand, means they only have to fight Ward and _Lorelei_ – only – but at least she can’t turn them against each other. Jemma makes a point to highlight the importance of that, even as they both remember what an Asgardian can do.

(They don’t even know if the necklace is fixed or not.)

Jemma is just about to tell Skye about her powers, to offer to take Ward out if she can, when Coulson and May show up – they’ve been hiding in one of the storage pods and Jemma has never been so thankful to see either of them in her life. Sif shows up a few minutes after, having apparently ridden on top of the Bus for a ways.

(And okay, she may startle when Coulson first shows up and accidentally touch him with her right hand before she realizes – and she was right, the trauma of _dying_ was not one she needed to ever experience – but at least he’s _here_.)

May heads off to deal with Ward while Jemma is still trying to re-center herself from what she’s seen. Skye tells Coulson and Sif about the new dendrotoxin Jemma was working on and about the neurodisrupter that Fitz had been fiddling with.

Neither Coulson nor Sif like it, but by this point he’s sensible enough not to volunteer to go when he might run into Lorelei and even Sif doesn’t think she can handle it all on her own. And Jemma absolutely will not allow Skye to go, not when they’ve just gotten her back. So she puts on a brave face, says, “It’ll be fine,” with a bright smile and heads out.

All Jemma has to do is get into the cage, retrieve the necklace, (fix it if it’s still damaged, but she’s really hoping it’s not) and hand it off to Sif who will, likely, be fighting with Lorelei by then. Easy.

She hears May and Ward before she sees them, but she doesn’t allow herself to linger, because as much as she wants to go to him, he’s not himself and helping him in this situation would not, actually, help him, and she doesn’t want to knock him out.

She finally rounds the final corner that will get her to the Cage and – there’s Lorelei, standing tall with her hands on her hips and facing the door of the very Cage that Jemma wants into.

Jemma doesn’t let herself hate very much, it’s a hole she knows she could oh too easily fall down with everything she sees but – she thinks she would be okay if this woman was dead and she thinks she would be okay if she was the one to do it.

Not, of course, that she’s going to be able to manage _that_. But if she can manage just enough that Sif has time to grab the necklace – she should be right behind Jemma, after all.

It’s not a well thought out plan, she’ll admit, especially as it’s not the one they’d all agreed on, but it’s going to work because she’s can’t wait any longer, not when her brief glance to May and Ward showed her that they were close to killing each other. She can’t let that happen.

The small metal disk fits easily onto Lorelei’s back and the woman is turning and sneering before it starts to effect her at all, and then she’s just reaching for it and Jemma’s hands – both of them – are wrapped around her arm and –

Laughing.

It’s men saying _no_ and being ignored by her parents and laughing.

Jemma can’t help it, it’s so absurd, and a laugh bursts out of her throat while she watches the shallowest trauma she’s ever experienced – and it stretches across millennia.

Jemma blinks and she can see present over the superimposed images of the past and Lorelei has tears running down her face and has fallen back against the wall with an arm up to defend herself and –

Jemma laughs again.

Lorelei jerks her arm out of Jemma’s grasp and though she’s not as strong as she was a moment ago, when she backhands Jemma, she still goes crashing into a wall.

Her back hurts and there’s blood in her mouth.

She blinks.

Sif is wrestling with Lorelei.

She blinks.

Ward’s forehead is creased and he’s got a split lip and his eyes are dark.

She blinks.

The ceiling above her is bright white tiles and moving rapidly and she’s sure it’s not on the Bus.

She blinks.

Someone’s shining a light into her eye and it hurts and she closes them.

 

***

 

There’s a steady beeping. It’s not the persistent beeping of her alarm and doesn’t sound like any of the various alarms they have throughout the lab – which are, quite frankly, more obnoxious and mostly of a higher pitch than this.

It makes her anxious though. And, as if it’s reading her thoughts, the pace of the beeping increases as she starts to become uncomfortable with it.

Jemma finally forces her eyes open and the world swims for a moment before settling.

She’s been in enough hospital rooms to be able to identify one, though it takes her mind a moment to dig through why she would be in one at all. And then it takes another moment for her to realize that there’s something _more_ familiar about this room than it just being another hospital room.

When she and Fitz first graduated they’d toured a number of facilities – nominally to find somewhere they liked but Jemma was well aware it was more about finding commanding officers who wouldn’t be taken aback by their sometimes demanding personalities – Fitz fell ill at one of them and ended up having to have his appendix removed.

She’s at the Cube and she can’t remember getting here. In fact, the last thing she thinks she clearly remembers is Ward’s face but that’s…that’s silly. She was fighting Lorelei and there’s no way she did enough damage that he was freed.

Right?

She moves her gaze from the ceiling to the room around her. Everything is white and sterile. There’s a window set into the far wall but she can only see sky out of it. Someone has left a cup of water on her bedside table with a straw in it and her throat hurts – they probably had to put a breathing tube in, which isn’t encouraging but she’s awake and that is – but she can’t move her arm very well.

There’s a pressure cuff, she realizes, on her arm and when she tries to lift her hand it moves sluggishly and the beeping increases. There’s no way that she can hold a cup steady in her hand and so she lets her arm drop back to the bed. That movement jars something and her breath catches at the weird pain in her shoulder and the beeping gets even faster.

It’s a heart monitor, of course.

She hopes that it means a nurse or someone will show up soon, but when no one comes after what feels like several long minutes – but might be only seconds, she’s not sure what she’s on and various medications can have very interesting effects on the passage of time – she starts to look around for a call button.

There isn’t one.

She tries to gather enough moisture in her mouth to call out, but before she has there’s a loud crash outside her door and then a distant boom that shakes her bed.

She clutches at the rails and looks in alarm to the window – she can see smoke in the sky but not where it’s coming from and –

The beeping is starting to make her head ache. She locates the sensor that’s around her left index finger but it takes longer than she wants to remove, and by then there have been another series of crashes outside her door and the sounds of what is most assuredly a fight.

Slowly, very slowly because she’s drugged and because the movement hurts, she forces herself slightly higher on the bed so she can see the door more clearly and readies her hands – both bare – on top of the blankets. (Holding them up for any length of time is exhausting and looking weak won’t, in this case, probably hurt her chances. She needs them to get close, after all.)

There’s the sound of a final crash and then silence outside her door.

She waits with baited breath and then her door is being pushed open and –

“ _Ward_ ,” she almost sobs his name when she sees him and then he’s moving a chair under the handle on her door and striding across the small room to her. He’s got blood at the corner of his mouth and a cut under his eye and dirt on his hands but when he cups her cheek with his hand (the fingerless glove feels rough) she leans into it gratefully.

“Jemma,” he says, tilting her face up so he can see, “how do you feel?” 

“What,” she starts to ask but her throat is too dry for her to continue. He swears, softly, under his breath and reaches for the cup at her bedside, being careful not to jostle her even though he’s perched on her bed now. The water is cool against her throat but she can only take a few mouthfuls before it’s too cold and suddenly she’s shivering.

He swears again, louder this time, and stands up carefully. He pulls a blanket from under her bed and carefully lays that over her, but that doesn’t make her feel any more warm and then he’s yanking the curtains off their rods and laying those over her.

She’s still cold, but she can ignore it now, and she tries to stop herself from shivering as violently as she reaches for him. The sight of her bare hand, however, gives her pause.

He notices, and after one last circuit of the room reveals no new blankets he grabs two gloves from the box on the little table and hands them to her. They’re mediums and nitrile, but she’s glad to have anything on her hands.

“What happened?” she asks, once he’s pulled a chair over and has folded his hands around hers.

He grimaces and rubs at his eyebrow for a moment before glancing towards the door. There have been some other noises from further in the building, but none nearby since he’s come in and, well, he’s got blood that isn’t his on his gloves. Clearly something is happening.

“HYDRA revealed itself.”

Jemma wonders if she maybe has a concussion or something else, or maybe she simply misheard him – HYDRA, as far as she knows, hasn’t been around since the forties when it was defeated by the allied forces. And yes, certainly there are neo-Nazis and the like these days but…Neo-HYDRA?

She has to clear her throat before she can question him though, and then he’s got the cup of water and straw at her mouth and she is still so very thirsty.

His hands smooth over the blankets once he’s put the cup down, and it helps, warms her up. “What? HYDRA like…from World War two?” she finally asks.

His hands pause where they’re rubbing her shoulders and he lets out a breath, leans away from her and slouches back in the chair. “They…Apparently they’ve been working inside us – inside SHIELD since the beginning. And today, for some reason, they decided to come out. The command was on all of the secure SHIELD channels.”

She knows she’s gaping at him but she doesn’t know what else to do – this is _insane_.

He rubs a hand over his face and she realizes how tired he looks, underneath the dirt and the blood there’s some fear and a whole lot of exhaustion. Which, if what he’s saying is true – and obviously he wouldn’t lie to her – then what about…

Her heart in her throat she asks, “What about the team? Where’s…everyone else? Are they okay?”

He drops his hand from his face and reaches for her hand again, tangling their fingers together and squeezing lightly. “I don’t know, Jemma. They were all headed to the Hub, last I heard, I’m the only one who came with you after…” She can’t read the look he’s giving her and then he’s clearing his throat and saying, “After the situation with Lorelei got cleared up. You came here for treatment and I came with, everyone else went to work on something to do with Centipede.”

She grabs for his hand with her other and he doesn’t make a sound as she tightens her grip, she’s scared for them and she realizes he is too. “Are we…are we safe, here?”

He scoots to the edge of his seat and closer to her and reaches out to brush some of her hair behind her ear. “Yeah, SHIELD still has control of the Cube, I came as soon as the main fighting was done to make sure no one had ventured this far and to check on you.” He chuckles. “You weren’t supposed to wake up until later this week, according to the doctors.”

Jemma tries to smile, though she knows it shakes, but she’s rewarded by his own expression softening further. “I’ve always been an overachiever.”

 

***

 

The team, it turns out, is fine. They had more opposition and a lot more close calls, but they all made it through successfully.

Well. Almost.

 Jemma’s with Ward and they’re listening to Coulson on speakerphone when they find out that Garrett is HYDRA. He breaks a glass and then leaves the room and Jemma, still too weak to make more than brief forays from her bed, can’t follow him.

She finishes up the conversation with Coulson and makes a plan for meeting back up with them, once she’s fit to travel, before he comes back.

She’s the one who tells him that they’ve moved Garrett to the Fridge. And since the Fridge is between the Hub and the Cube, she’s the one who recommends, for his own peace of mind, that maybe they could stop over when they go to meet up with the team, so that he can have some sense of closure.

He holds her so tightly, for that, that her ribs protest, but he’s been terribly gentle with her and so she simply holds him back. It’s grounding.

Two days later they find out that Garrett died trying to escape in transit and she gets to hold him again, this time with him curled up in her lap and sobbing.

According to her doctor, who wasn’t HYDRA luckily, she still shouldn’t try to travel for another week, but she’s already planning their flight for three days later because they need to get back to their team where they’re safe. (Neither she nor her doctor mention the notations she found on her chart that advise that she be locked away for study, once she’s healed, and she certainly never brings it up with Ward.)

The next day they find out that their team has fled and the US military has reclaimed the Hub.

No one is coming for the Cube, it’s a black site, but that doesn’t make waiting there any easier while they try to contact anyone.

It’s five days before they get a phone call from Skye with coordinates. They leave the same day.

 

***

 

Providence is…nice.

The base is startlingly cold and Jemma isn’t sure if it’s just that her temperature is still not regulating properly or if it’s actually as chilly as she thinks it is. Whenever she’s sitting somewhere for more than a few minutes though, she starts to shiver.

 Skye finds a stash of thick blankets and it becomes standard practice for anyone to grab one and throw it around Jemma’s shoulders whenever she settles somewhere.

That’s nice.

Trying to tell the team about her powers without revealing the sort of details that will get her dragged back to Afterlife kicking and screaming is…less nice.

Especially when she doesn’t have answers to so many of their questions.

“It’s a gene,” she says with a shrug, “few people have it, most don’t. I don’t know more.” And later, “No, I didn’t _choose_ this. I didn’t want this. It was an accident.” And again, “I can’t tell if you have the gene, Fitz, I don’t know what it is I just know that there is a gene.”

May asks the least questions, only probing once about how Jemma used it against Lorelei.

No one is completely comfortable with the answer and she’s not surprised when she’s given a slightly wider berth the next day.

Except for Ward who still seems oddly small to her, since the loss of his mentor, and who wraps a blanket around her and puts a cup of terrible coffee in her hands without flinching the next morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please let me know what you think!


	3. barophobia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jemma knows that most of Providence has opinions about her and Ward – she may not be a specialist but even she can overhear a whispered conversation when the participants aren’t aware enough to realize she’s sitting right behind them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter, as all the others, wouldn't be possible without JD, who continues to be amazing.
> 
> And also a few really crumby days at work, which are less amazing, but gave me the break through on this chapter so whatever.
> 
> Oh! You may notice that the chapter count has gone up. I didn't want to do it, god did I not want to do it, but I cannot finish this in this chapter so a million apologies.

“Be safe,” she says, head tilted up to meet his gaze, hands fisted loosely at her side.

She knows what this looks like, this isn’t that.

“I always am,” he replies, lips curled in a small smile as he cups her cheek and then gives her a quick kiss on the top of her head before stepping back.

She forces a tremulous smile and turns away from him to give Skye a quick hug before retreating. Skye is pointedly looking away from their farewell and Jemma doesn’t know how to tell her that it’s platonic. (Despite how much she wishes it weren’t.)

Jemma knows that most of Providence has opinions about her and Ward – she may not be a specialist but even she can overhear a whispered conversation when the participants aren’t aware enough to realize she’s sitting right behind them.

He’s continued to be there for her since they got back, and she’s sure for those not on the team his closeness seems like it must mean something more. It doesn’t. Or, at least, if it does he’s done nothing to indicate it.

A kiss to the top of her head and a brush of his fingers against her cheek are the most she ever gets – sometimes she’s so sure that he’s going to kiss her that she can almost feel it, but he never does.

(She wonders, sometimes, if it’s all in her head or if he’s waiting for her to make a move. But she can’t even properly _touch_ him, and even though he’s the one who’s responded to her condition with the least amount of concern, she’s seen even him flinch a time or two when she’s almost touched him before realizing there’s a tear in her glove.)

It should be a simple mission and she knows she’s behaving as if they’re going off to their deaths, it’s just been quite some time since any of the core members of the team have been gone for more than a day. All they’re going to do is check out the Fridge – someone managed a very small-scale raid and what got taken has to be inventoried and the security reassessed – but she still feels nervous. Even if he will have Skye and the newest recruit, Hunter, at his back.

She should be worrying about other things – more important things – and yet her mind seems intent to force her to consider insignificant details and concerns. So while she walks back to her lab she tries to pull her mind away from the pretty, dark-haired specialist flirting with him yesterday and back into the matter of her work. (They got Kara out of a safe house moments before HYDRA appeared, and while Jemma is absolutely glad they did, she can still wish the woman were on another base.)

It’s easier said than done.

***

Jemma is sorting through the mess of intel stolen from HYDRA when she finds it.

 _Trip_ sends them his intel packets in neat little bundles that are well labeled and easy to distribute to the departments where they’ll do the most good. The information Jemma’s looking through is from Skye’s very brief foray into undercover work, during which she managed to slip a backdoor into their system that mined massive quantities of data. It also involved a jump jet exploding because of a rocket launcher.

No one’s been assigned to sort through it yet – it’s one of Coulson’s favorite threats these days for misbehaving agents – but it’s something that Jemma likes to go through in her downtime. It’s often horrifying but there’s something calming in the mindlessness of just sorting things into folders.

And tonight, with Fitz sleeping (like she should be), Ward and Skye still on their mission to the Fridge, and her nerves keeping her from rest, she wants to at least be doing something useful.

At first, she thinks that maybe she’s imagining it. She’s certainly gone longer without sleep but that doesn’t mean she couldn’t be misreading something.

She reads it again.

And again.

Then she flips back further into what they have on Centipede and she reads that.

She sits back in her chair and stares blankly at the far wall. She doesn’t realize her hands are shaking until she reaches for her glass of water and almost spills it over everything; she puts it down carefully and covers her mouth with a hand, smothering would could be a laugh or a sob because –

This is proof. This is irrefutable proof that Ward is – is? was? – HYDRA.

It both doesn’t make any sense (she remembers him fighting his way to her when she was still in bed, him killing a HYDRA agent outside her door, how paranoid he was that her doctor could be HYDRA, and how he wouldn’t leave her alone with him), and makes far too much (she remembers the crafty look he’d get sometimes before it would smooth out into behaving, how good he’d been at controlling himself even with the staff’s effects, how distraught he was when he found out Garrett had been killed, and how _ruthless_ he could get).

She reaches for her glass of water, carefully this time, and takes several long sips before setting it down.

No one else has gone through this information, she knows because it was deemed of not immediate importance – not like the schematics for the splinter bombs (which really, what are they doing? Their design is clearly flawed and though it makes her cringe it’s also a comfort to know how behind HYDRA’s weapons department is) which means she’s the only one who knows.

She finishes her water and thinks.

***

She has carefully removed every trace of the information from the ‘to be sorted’ intel and has it logically pieced together for when she goes to tell Coulson.

He’s on a mission or something at the moment – May hadn’t specified and Jemma was never high enough in old SHIELD to know if the Director normally took so many trips – and she doesn’t want someone else to trip over it in the meantime and start a manhunt.

On one hand, it’s not impossible that someone who _was_ HYDRA decided to legitimately side with SHIELD. But it’s not something she feels completely comfortable risking even if she cannot possibly imagine Ward doing anything to harm any of them. She feels almost guilty just for thinking it’s possible.

Maybe she has misread something and Coulson will take one look and tell her she’s being ridiculous. (She’s read the documents backwards and forwards, she knows it’s not possible that she’s misread it, but some part of her is still hoping.) In any case, it’s clearly not something she can handle on her own.

So, she’s decided. She’ll tell Coulson and let him sort it out.

***

She doesn’t see Ward and Skye when they get back – not because she’s avoiding him, but because she’s busy doing an autopsy on the mutilated body that Coulson brought back from his latest trip. She knows there’s something she’s missing but it doesn’t matter how many tests she runs or how she looks at the data she cannot figure it out and it’s starting to drive her a little bit mad.

Hours later she’s tipping precariously on her stool, finishing her fourth cup of coffee in as many hours and trying to read through a journal that may, she hopes, have the answers she’s looking for.

“Whoa,” Ward says, hands warm at her waist as he settles her more firmly in her seat, “careful, Simmons. What will the rest of us do if you’re the one hurt?”

She allows herself a brief moment to enjoy the heat of him at her back before turning her head and smiling. “You mean besides invest in a proper doctor – one who has, in fact, gone to medical school?”

He laughs and brushes some of her hair out of her face before pulling another stool close and settling into it. He keeps one hand on the small of her back the whole time and she wonders, if he is HYDRA, what does he gain from this? “You know no one else would put up with us.”

She knows that’s not remotely true, but it’s still nice to hear. She smiles and reaches for her coffee – her coffee that he’s suddenly holding to his face and sniffing. “Ward!” she tries, but he holds it out of her reach and shakes his head.

“Nope, I’m cutting you off.” He’s across the room in what seems like a flash and dumping her drink down the drain before rounding the table again and pulling her off the stool and into his arms. “Time for all good little biochemists to go to bed, come on.”

“I’m fine,” she says – the impact of which is somewhat dulled when she yawns immediately upon saying it.

He’s not carrying her – she is walking because she can feel her feet on the ground, but somehow he manages to move her much faster than she thinks she could manage on her own. Her head fits into the hollow of his shoulder with comfortable familiarity and she is most of the way to asleep before they reach the door to her room.

He keys in the code and leads her in – and if he is, actually, planning to betray them all she should probably consider changing her door code, but that thought is distant and not fully formed – setting her down on her bed and pulling off her shoes.

“I’m fine, Ward,” she tries again, even as he helps her tuck her legs under her blanket and pull it up to her chin.

“Uh-huh,” he says and then he’s leaning so close and she’s half convinced he’s going to kiss her but he simply removes her earrings and leans away. “You can call me Grant, you know.”

She tries to say something to that – she’s not sure what – but sleep drags her under before she manages anything intelligible.

***

Coulson is not well.

There is something eerily familiar about the pattern he’s etching into stone, but she can’t place it and even if she could it’s not like realizing that he’s somehow copying a cubist Picasso (or whatever it may actually be) is going to be the breakthrough that somehow saves him.

She tucks her report on Ward under her bed – she could tell May but Coulson has always been the more measured of the two and it’s not like Ward is actively a danger to them, it can wait until Coulson is better – and heads towards Coulson’s rooms. She’s listening to May for this, so even when Coulson objects she’s going to attempt to sedate him. If he doesn’t get some measure of rest his body is, in fact, going to give out on him.

***

“No.” Jemma isn’t changing her mind on this and she will be heard – she hadn’t recognized what it was from what were, apparently, blueprints, but now they are here and she knows and there is no way she’s letting any of her teammates down into those ruins. “I don’t know what HYDRA _thinks_ they’re going to be able to do here, but I promise you, it is not some superpower-guaranteed training ground or birthing chamber or whatever they think it is. For most of you – maybe all of you – it’s a death trap.”

“Simmons,” Coulson says, using his fatherly voice, which would be more convincing if this wasn’t the sanest he’s looked in _weeks_. “We don’t know what HYDRA wants there and –“

“No,” she says, pushing down a slightly hysterical laugh, “we _do_ know and we know that even if they have one person it still might not work and – sir, you have to listen to me, we have to leave here. Now!”

He regards her carefully for a moment and then lets out a heavy breath and nods. “We can take care of HYDRA when they try to leave and then explore if –“

“Fine, _fine_ ,” she’s willing to agree to virtually anything that gets them out of here _now._

He’s reaching to notify all the teams – this argument has taken much longer than Jemma wanted it to – when Lance’s voice comes loud through the channel.

“Somethin’s happened to Mack, he’s – he’s attacking us and – fuck, fuck, _fuck,_ I think his eyes are glowing? What the hell is –“ his communication ends in a fizzle and Jemma shares a panicked look with Coulson before taking off at a dead run.

“I want everyone to evacuate, now! Grab your equipment and – what do you mean we don’t know where Skye is?” she hears Coulson yelling into the channel as she takes off towards the underground entrance that Mack, Lance, Skye and Ward were supposed to be monitoring.

***

 Skye is slouched, shell-shocked, against one of the walls and staring in horror at her own hands.

 Jemma never wanted to bond with the other woman over that particular horror – she’s never wanted to bond with anyone over that and she turns away because it hurts too much to watch.

 The wall moves slowly, giving them an opening, and Jemma nudges Skye with her boot. Her latex gloves are long gone – shredded and useless – and her shirt isn’t in good enough shape that she can even use that as temporary protection. “We’ve got to go Skye, they’ll be worried.”

 Skye blinks up at her and Jemma sees that there are tears gathered and – it’s difficult, but she manages to pull the younger woman into her arms without touching her skin with her hands. But Skye is strong and after only a few moments of quiet shaking she’s dashing the tears from her eyes and forcing herself to her feet.

 “We need to bring her out, huh?”

 Jemma nods and grimaces. Carrying someone with her hands bare is never a very good idea, but with the physical aspects of Raina’s transformation it’s going to become very tricky, very quickly. “Yeah, it _should_ be safe for the others in here, but I’d rather not risk it if we don’t have to.”

 “Right,” Skye sounds steady again and sure of herself as she says it, but she still hesitates before reaching for Raina and Jemma wants to hug her again.

 She resists and focuses on figuring out how best to help get the unconscious woman out of the circular room.

 They end up half-dragging her, but she’s mostly un-bruised by the time they get her outside and most of the team is waiting for them. Jemma steps back and runs her hands over her face. She’s filthy and she would love even a wet wipe, but there’s too much to do.

 Coulson is directing people to get Raina secured while not letting go of Skye’s shoulders and Jemma is about to step forward and bring up the fact that she knows who they have to call when suddenly there’s a dirty tactical vest inches from her face.

 She knows her thoughts are moving sluggishly, but it still takes her a long moment to realize that it’s Ward looming over her with a scowl.

 “Ward, what – “ she cuts herself off because he’s cupping her face between both of his palms and leaning close enough that she can see it’s not a scowl so much as it is deep seated concern etched into every line of his face. “I’m okay.”

 “Thank fuck,” he says and then he’s kissing her.

 He’s got less dirt on him than she does, but she still can’t tell if the grit in the kiss is from his lips or hers and she doesn’t care so long as he _never stops_.

 Her hands flutter uselessly at her side for a moment before she finds a place at the waist of his vest to latch on where she’s not going to actually touch him and –

 It’s better than her daydreams.

 After a moment – eternities long and yet not close to long enough – he pulls back and rests his forehead against hers. “Don’t ever, _ever_ do something like that again. I can’t protect you if –“ He cuts himself off and kisses her again before she can defend her actions – not that she wants to, she never wants to do anything like that ever again.

“Guys,” May’s sharp voice has him pulling back and her turning her head to see the others, though his hands and hers stay where they are. “Do that later, we’ve got to evacuate.”

 Jemma nods and reluctantly pulls away from Ward – Grant. He lets her go but steps close and stays at her shoulder as she moves towards everyone else.

 “Do we even know what –“ Coulson is asking, cutting himself off when he clearly doesn’t know how to continue, staring at where Raina is laying, still and terrifying.

 “I know who can help – there’s – I can call someone. Someone who can help with…this,” Jemma says, proud that her voice only wavers a little and endlessly grateful for the support she imagines she can feel radiating off of Grant.

***

Afterlife is exactly how Jemma remembers it – and in a flash she’s seven again.

She can almost feel her brother’s sharp elbow as he nudges her – this is _his_ visit, she was only allowed to come because her mum couldn’t find a nanny that Jem hadn’t brought to tears. (Adults trying to dumb down facts to her was something she’d lost patience for _at_ four.)

She feels small and frozen and lost – so lost without her father’s hand on her shoulder and mother’s perfume in her nose – and she almost turns around to demand that Gordon take her away – anywhere – just away from where she’ll lose her brother and get told ‘ _these things happen’_ – but then Skye is nudging her carefully and she’s shoved unceremoniously back into the present as she takes a great big heaving breath and tries to ignore how it even _smells_ the same.

“Jemma,” says a familiar voice and she turns towards the only inhuman she kept any contact with when she left, “these are the newly transitioned?”

“Mhm,” she nods, “Lincoln, meet Skye,” Skye waves, a small, jerky motion that the other woman manages to make look graceful, “and Raina.” She tilts her head at the still bound woman; glad Gordon hasn’t released her yet.

***

The room that Gordon takes her to is so reminiscent of the room she’d been put in after…after her own transition that she thinks it must have been on purpose.

It might even be the same room.

It’s a struggle to smile at Skye as Lincoln hooks a hand under her elbow and leads her away, but she does. Jemma’s demons aren’t going to get in the way of Skye getting whatever help she can, not from Jemma and certainly not from the elders. However much they still must resent her – and they must to place her here and not let her assist with Skye’s sessions – they won’t harm another inhuman for their dislike.

It isn’t until Jemma is placing the small bag she’d brought with her – a bag Lincoln, at least, had looked embarrassed to search through to make sure she hadn’t brought anything illicit – that she remembers.

She failed, again, to tell Coulson about what she’d found.

***

Time passes slowly with nothing to occupy herself, but it passes. She’s allowed access to the library, but no communication with the outside world, except for weekly video messages to the team, and no contact with Skye. The elders are deeply displeased with her for revealing their existence to SHIELD. The fact that she only told Coulson and no one else, doesn’t appease them at all.

Lincoln gives her updates on Skye while still not allowing them to see each other. She’s sure he’s only following orders, but she can’t help but resent _him_ for the separation. (She already thinks poorly of the elders, she’s not used to thinking poorly of Lincoln.)

Raina, Jemma has seen every day since the woman left her room for the first time. It’s from her that Jemma discovers Skye hasn’t been allowed to see anyone aside from Lincoln and the elders. She’d thought the restrictions were just on her, but to find out that it’s not true is deeply distressing. And she cannot even tell the team. She’s been expressly forbidden to tell them anything about Afterlife or how it’s run.

She spends more time with Raina then she perhaps should.

The other woman is disillusioned about her ‘specialness,’ bitter about the physical transformation she’s undergone and the treatment she’s received, and since no one else in Afterlife will hear it spoken ill of, Raina and Jemma have formed a tentative friendship.

She hasn’t told Raina about her mother’s fervent belief that the book with the crystal that transformed her was left specifically for her – scientific bait in a room filled with philosophy for a precocious eight year old.

And Raina doesn’t tell her about her ability to see the future until a week after Jemma has seen Skye for the first time since they arrived.

The next week there’s no video message from the team waiting for her. She wants to believe it’s just the elders censoring what the team sent – but mostly she’s worried that it’s not. That the team didn’t send anything – not because they didn’t want to, but because they _couldn’t_.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find my writing tumblr [here](http://capriciouswrites.tumblr.com/). <3
> 
> If you enjoyed this please let me know! I'm working on the fourth chapter now, because apparently I fail at wrapping things up cleanly, but comments are the best encouragement!


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